The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Yahoo! R&D center, Haifa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These days using a Yahoo e-mail address carries all the cultural cachet of carrying a Zune, signaling membership in the bridge-and-tunnel crowd of the tech world.

It also means you’re an energy hog, according to a study released Thursday.

Opower is an Arlington, Va., startup that provides a software platform to 70 utilities so their customers can monitor and manage energy consumption. That has given Opower a big database so the company decided to look at the correlation between a 2.8 million households’ e-mail addresses and their energy use.

Since a large proportion of those households had either Yahoo or Google Gmail addresses, Opower analyzed their electricity bills.

“We found that the average Yahoo Mail household uses 11% more electricity per year than a Gmail household,” the company wrote on its blog. “It’s a sizeable, statistically significant difference.”

How big a difference? Enough to power the Caribbean nation of Barbados for a year, according to Opower. The company found that the average Yahoo household spends $110 more a year on electricity than the average Gmail household.

Opower, citing its own analysis and data from Experian, said the households are spread across 23 states but that those with Yahoo addresses tended to live in suburbia and thus inhabit bigger homes than urban-dwelling Gmailers. Suburbanites also tend to have families and be homebodies, at least compared to those young and single Gmail hipsters, and thus use more electricity, according to Opower.

“Our own household characteristics data similarly suggest that Yahoo users reside in larger residences: Yahoo households are approximately 10% more likely than Gmail households to live in single-family residences (as opposed to apartments and condos),” the company wrote on its blog.

But that’s not the whole story.

“Even controlling for home size, we found that Yahoo households are still more energy-intensive than Gmail households,” said Opower. “Based on square footage data that we have for single-family residences, we found that the typical Yahoo Mail household uses 12% more electricity per square foot of living space (6.84 kWh/sqft) than the typical Gmail household.”